


An initial delve in fluff vs angst in drarry fics

by bafflinghaze



Series: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter Specific Statistics [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Meta, Nonfiction, statistics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2021-02-07 09:16:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21455647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bafflinghaze/pseuds/bafflinghaze
Summary: With drarry fics, what kind of content do people like to write and read? There have been general analyses into genre, and tags across fandom at large, but here this is just focused on Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Series: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter Specific Statistics [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1546681
Kudos: 33





	An initial delve in fluff vs angst in drarry fics

**Author's Note:**

> Initially posted on my tumblr [here](https://bafflinghaze.tumblr.com/post/184992660423/an-initial-delve-in-fluff-vs-angst-in-drarry-fics).

With drarry fics, what kind of content do people like to write and read? The following looks at FLUFF vs ANGST. What we find is that the majority of fics don’t have _either_ tags (unsurprisingly, since the push for clear tagging is relatively recent).

Results and graphs first, method at the end! Briefly, people like to write _fluff_ more, but people tend to click on fics with _angst_ more (measured by hits).

* * *

##  **Results**

The proportions of tagged Fluff vs Angst fic is roughly the same. Interestingly though, there was more Angst around 2006. But now we’re currently in a period of more fluff! (Is this a product of our times???) Since approximately 2013, the proportion & amount of fluff has been steady increasing (dip in 2019 because the year is not over).

## Ratings vs Fluffiness and Angstyness

Another obvious thing to look at is how the tags change as the rating changes. There’s quite a lot of #fluff in General Rated and Not-Rated fic, whereas #angst takes a larger chunk at Mature and Explicit rated fics. This is expected.

## Which is more popular?

In the following, we have a scatter plot of the number of kudos versus hits for all the categorised fics.

Quickly, some outliers: there is ONE fic with a lot of hits that has the Angst tag. The majority of the high hits/high kudos fics have _neither_ tags, and such fics also tend to have more hits/given kudos than other types, but this could be just due to the sheer greater number of un-categorised fic. Also, Fluff/Angst/Flangst are pretty equal when it comes to high hits/high kudos outliers.

If we look closer at the main cluster of fics: we see a tendency for fics without tagging fluff or angst to have more hits. Angst also appears to have slightly more hits than fluff fics, while fluff tends to have higher kudos given hits.

The above was just a quick look at the stats on fluff versus angst fics. The most interesting is how fluff has been increasing in the recent years. Also of note is how angst fics tend to get more hits given certain kudos. This could be because angst tends to go with a higher rating, which in turn gets more hits.  


* * *

## Method

The above uses data scraped from the completed Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter works on AO3, as of May 2019 (see [previous analysis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21455416) for further details).

To define the categories, I looked at the additional tags. If there was #fluff but no #angst in any sub-tag (i.e, “so much fluff”, “fluffy” etc. would also count), then that work was categorised as “Just Fluff”. “Just Angst” included only those with the words “angst” or “angsty”. The “Both” category includes those with tags in both sets, and also incudes fics with the tag #flangst. The “Neither” category has all the remaining fics.

The above analysis therefore relies on what I counted as fluff or angst (for example, I _did not_ include hurt or comfort or major character death in one of the categories).

  



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